es, which all
religions contain as their nucleus, and on which it may be hoped that
all religious persons may agree. That established, we should have a
result which might be small, but would at least be solid; and on it and
round it the ruddier additional beliefs on which the different
individuals make their venture might be grafted, and flourish as richly
as you please. I shall add my own over-belief (which will be, I
confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a critical philosopher),
and you will, I hope, also add your over-beliefs, and we shall soon be
in the varied world of concrete religious constructions once more. For
the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic part of the task.

Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same
conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we
survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the
thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand
and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic,
Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in
their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus
variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must
look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant
elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit
exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas
and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be
perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into
one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with
an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to
go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to
draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.

The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological
order do they belong?

The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a
"sthenic" affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive,
"dynamogenic" order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers.
In almost every lecture, but especially in the lectures on Conversion
and on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotion overcomes
temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to the Subject, or a
zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects
of life.[340] The name of "faith-state," by which Prof